1. Technical Field
The present invention relates generally to an apparatus and method for generating a digital clone. More particularly, the present invention relates to an apparatus and method for generating a digital clone, which reconstruct even a deformed portion of the unique appearance of an actor based on the motion of the actor, together with the motion, thus realistically reproducing the behavioral expression of the actor.
2. Description of the Related Art
Generally, three-dimensional (3D) human body models play a very important role in the fields of video content such as 3D games, in addition to computer animation. In order to produce animation of such a human body model, a human body model that enables shape deformations based on controlling the posture of the skeletal structure of a human body to be made must be generated first before the production of the animation.
The generation of a human body model is performed using a character setup or rigging task that defines a skeletal structure obtained by approximating the skeletal system of a human body to a mesh or surface model that represents the appearance of a desired human body, and that causes the appearance of the human body to be deformed by controlling the movement and rotation of individual joints of the skeletal structure.
Such a rigging task is an operation that causes the deformations in the appearance of a human body to take place depending on the movement and rotation of joints by binding mesh vertexes or surface vertexes of the appearance connected to each joint of the skeletal structure. Further, such a rigging task is an operation that approximates the muscular structure of a human body, binds the approximated muscular structure to the skeletal structure, and binds a muscle to adjacent mesh vertexes or surface vertexes, so that the joints of the skeletal structure are controlled to cause a muscle model to respond to a motion and the vertexes bound to the muscle model to also respond to the motion, thus causing deformations of the appearance of the human body. Upon this rigging task, a commercial tool such as Autodesk Maya has been mainly utilized in the actual field of content creation.
The generation of a human body model performed using this scheme has currently been applied to video content such as movie films. However, the current task of generating human body models is dependent on the manual operation of professional designers, require a lot of work time and transcendental experiences, and also require a lot of computation time to perform shape deformations in high-quality. A more significant problem is that when a geometric shape is deformed in the appearance of a rigged human body model, the task of reworking the entire generation of a human body model is inevitably required.
Further, a technology of generating the unique human body model of an actor from a 3D scanner has a limitation in that unique appearance deformation characteristics, which did not appear when an initial actor model was obtained, are not desirably reconstructed due to the limitations of a mesh-based local shape deformation method that is used to deform the appearance of a human body.
In addition, a technology for generating the unique human body model of an actor from multi-view images of principal frames is disadvantageous in that since the appearance deformations of an actor based on the motions of individual frames are reconstructed using the appearance information of an initial actor model, dependence on the appearance precision of the initial actor model is high.